All Stories In The End
by chasingdragondreams
Summary: Tales of our favorite characters in the 39 Clues fandom, may be romantic or non. Mostly drabbles, some one-shots. "We're all stories in the end." -Doctor Who listed complete, but may add some later
1. Natalie

**A.N. Hi, I just created this account, and my name is Rhetorically Yours. I'm not new to fanfiction, I guess, since I've been reading things on here for at least a year before I created this account. **

**This collection is just random bits and pieces of writing, nothing fancy like those twenty-thousand word stories some people publish. How do they have that much patience?**

**And I don't pre-write (some people do?), just as a heads-up. Happy reading! **

**Disclaimer: I don't own the 39 Clues, or Vespers Rising!**

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_#42: butterfly effect: where the ripple in the pond becomes a hurricane_  
_character: Natalie/Ian (family, people; get your minds out of the gutter) with hints of Natalie/Dan_

My hands fly up to my mouth, and I fan myself frantically. "What?" I say in the most undignified manner.

"That's not- that's not possible!"

The doctor fixes his steely glare on me and repeats. "You have a rare genetic disorder that-"

I cut him off.

"The last part?" I whimper.

"Miss Kabra," he repeats in that no-nonsense voice. "Whatever substance abuse you partook in, combined with the genetic disorder, catalyzed your body's heat for a small amount of time, long enough for your ovaries to be fried."

"What does that mean?" I ask, hoping for symptoms like nausea, cramping or headaches. Normal stuff.

But then he hits me with a bombshell.

"In short, you cannot biologically produce kids."

* * *

Ian is waiting for me outside the door, anxious for the test results. When he hears the click of my red Prada wedges on the cheap linoleum floor, he jumps up with the most despicable look on his face: hope.

"Well, what is it?" he demands, flicking a look at the hospital chart hanging by the door. "Chicken pox, cancer, polio, the bubonic plague?"

I want to hit him on the head until his stuffing's knocked out. What idiot classifies chicken pox and cancer in the same sentence?

"I haven't got all day, you know."

My lips are pressed shut, like not saying it will make it disappear with a poof! and a shower of glitter. Eventually, I force the words out in the middle of one of his tirades on hospital sanitary levels in America.

"I need to know if you fed me any poison in the last few months."

"What! Why?"

"The doctor spouted a loud of crap about substance abuse catalyzing a rare genetic disorder. Which is great, except I haven't been abusing substances, and-."

"And-"

My voice quavers in the middle of my sentence. "And now I can't have kids. Care to explain what's been 'catalyzing my system'?"

He knows, I can tell by the look in his eye. Ian pinches the bridge of his nose, one of his habits when delivering bad news. (Natalie, that Prada handbag is sold out. Natalie, Mum and Dad are too busy to chaperone for your class trip. Natalie, Mummy killed a person.) He swallows slightly, and he closes his eyes.

"When we rescued the hostages, I had to make a choice. You were in really bad shape, Natalie, and Sinead came out with this look on her face.

She said that if you weren't given proper treatment, you were going to die. I had to make a choice. You're my little sister, Natalie," he adds, stressing 'little sister' a tad unnecessarily.

"It was either give you a watered-down version of the serum or let you die. I sat there for an hour until she came out and said I had to make a damn decision right now, or you'd be in a coma for the rest of your life.

I thought I made the right decision, I really did. You had your whole life ahead of you, you were going to go to St. Anne's in the fall, and Daniel was going to-"

He clears his throat.

"How close was I?" I manage, voice dangerously close to cracking.

Ian lets out a bitter laugh. "Let's just say if your other cousin hadn't come in and told me to hurry the hell up, she's dying for Gideon's sake, I'd be burying you in the ground instead of sitting out here on a hospital chair."

He says it so broken-heartedly, and I think to myself that no one should have to choose between saving your sister and leaving her with a life-long defect.

"Wh-?" It really does break this time. I cough into my sleeve. "Why? Mum took it, and Gideon took it, and they didn't have any defects."

Ian's much better than me at medical stuff; after he finished being an art-dealer to support us, he went on to medical school with Amy. If anyone knows, he would.

"When they took it, they were perfectly healthy. You were on the brink of death, and something that would change fate also ravaged your system worse than it would a normal person."

I can feel my bottom lip starting to shake. "It's not- it's not fair!" I whine, tears pricking at the corner of my eyes. They overflow, cascading down my cheeks.

"I was supposed to get married, and have a mansion with a white picket fence! And be a fashion designer, and have three kids, and the most spoiled white Yorkshire named Gucci!"

I sniffle, and he hands me a cold handkerchief smelling of cucumbers, with the underlying scent of vanilla body fragrance. Smells like Amy.

"You can still have that," Ian soothes me, looking pained. "Nothing's stopping you from being a world-renowned designer, Natalie. Daniel was going to- and you can still have the faerie-tale ending. You're only fifteen, for Gideon's sake. Stupid mistakes I made two years ago shouldn't have to influence your decisions."

Handing me a peppermint, he stands up abruptly and shakes the dirt off his black trench coat.

"Where are you going?" I ask through bleary eyes.

"We," he corrects, offering me something I haven't done in years, since I was a little girl. "We are going to go get frozen yoghurt with strawberries on top."

"Real yoghurt?" I ask warily. "With one-hundred-percent real strawberries on top?" You can never be too sure; Americans have the strangest tendency to freeze their food and heat it up again. Disgusting, and it's soggy most of the time.

"Real yoghurt. And then we're going to stop by the Cahill mansion, and we're going to laugh at Daniel's annoying American habits."

My brother holds out a hand, and I walk with my usual confidence through the halls until we find the entrance.

I have a life to life, and I'm not going to let anything stop me, including stupid catalysts stuck inside my body or the fact that we're about to go to some (slightly cute) git's house so my brother can go make out with his sister.

At least I'll get vanilla yoghurt with strawberries on top.

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**Fin.**


	2. Sinead

**Disclaimer: I don't own the 39 Clues, or Vespers Rising! O.O Did not notice I published it twice, thanks for telling me!**

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_#59: quite_  
_character: Sinead/Jonah fluff, after the clue hunt and when they're in their early twenties._

"You know you love me," Jonah teased, winding his arms around her waist.

"No," she said, rolling her eyes fondly at him. Not in a Gideon-Wizard-you're-so-thick way, but a Gideon-Wizard-you're-thick-but-I-love-you. Note the difference (sarcasm intended).

So it was her next words that shocked the swag right out of him.

"I love your name."

* * *

He peered at her in a new way, wondering for a second if she was one of those girls addicted to fame. They followed a lot of his co-stars around, hanging on to their arms and making kissy faces. Quite frankly, they were disturbing.

Then he realized that Sinead Starling would be the one tossing snarky remarks at the fan-girls, let alone be one.

Perish the thought.

She wriggled in his embrace, turning to look at him scathingly and reminded him that she didn't mean anything like that.

"Didn't you ever read one of those really good books, the ones you can't stop and wish that you could write like that?"

He nodded, not knowing where she was going with this.

"Did you ever notice that the names and places in those books are just a little different from real life? Like the name Katie Bell, or Oliver Wood. Or Amelia Pond from Doctor Who, or Victor Krum-"

"You can stop the examples now," he called, amused. "I get the point."

"I think it's a literary concept, how authors create characters who have out-of-the-ordinary names."

A literary concept. His interest was piqued. Shifting their position to him lying on his back in the grass and her head resting on his chest, he reached for a dandelion.

"Sinead Starling is nothing to scoff at," he argued reasonably, plucking the thin yellow petals off. "It's not like Annie Johnson or Zane Thomas."

"Neither is Jonah Wizard," she retorted. "The point is, normal people don't marry people with fairy-tale names. Or live on fairy-tale streets."

"So, you think it's all predetermined?" Jonah asked curiously.

"Exactly. I mean look at it this way; if a Cahill gets together with a non-Cahill, look what happens. The spark's driven right out of them."

Jonah couldn't help but point out that his parents were half-normal, half-Janus, but he realized they weren't as happy as when he was a kid, when Broderick didn't have to follow his son everywhere and Cora didn't stay out on Friday nights planning out the future of her branch.

Some days, he wondered how two people so different could ever fall in love. If opposites attracted, then Mom and Dad would be stuck together all the time.

Sinead tested an INTJ on the Myers-Briggs test, a psychological test that determined sixteen types. It was like one of those self-quizzes in magazines (he'd been interviewed for more than a dozen), Introverted or Extroverted, iNtuition or Sensing, Thinking or Feeling and Percieving or Judging. Typical traits of an INTJ were those of the archetypal 'mad genius' portrayed by the likes of Einstein and Da Vinci.

Jonah was ESFP, the 'performer' type. That meant he could write his own songs and think a little deeper than the usual idiots who had other people ghost-write their songs.

In theory, they were perfect for each other. Meaning no fights, no throwing of vases (however cliche that was, and in any case, she'd thrown a concentrated alkaline in his face the last time they'd had a fight) and no screaming.

Of course, that was purely theoretical.

In any case, if the whole myth about 'opposites attract, and balance each other out,' Sinead and the Holt would've been dating a long time ago. As it was, they were friends, but not so close that she wouldn't throw in the odd insult in conversations.

"Except the crazy-artist type," she added as an afterthought. "You can't really tell with those." Raising her cupped palms to her lips, she delicately blew on the dandelion fuzz. They wafted away in the wind, some catching on blades of grass, some falling on Jonah's shirt.

"So where does that leave us? We've got a 'crazy-artist' type and a snarky genius."

"But we _do_ have fairy-tale names."

"Hmm."

"I'll buy you a street," he promised. "A nice, big street with a name like 3400 Dowling."

"That _does_ change the experiment, doesn't it?"

There was one thing wrong with her theory about names: the velvet weight in his pocket that would (hopefully) soon change her name from Starling to Wizard, which was enough fairy-tale for a life-time. Thinking back to their conversation earlier, the corners of his mouth tugged into an unconscious smile.

Coincidence, really, that the topic of names would pop up right before he proposed.

_That does change the experiment, doesn't it?_

"Quite."

**the divider line won't load, so here's an awkward bit**

**A.N. Thanks for all the reviews, I didn't think I'd generate that many from one chapter!**

**Volcanic Lily- Yeah, the part about 'Mummy killed a person' was supposed to be humorous, because Isabel's such a horrible parent. I'm glad you thought so.**

**Helloooo It's me- If you want to, you can expand on the idea yourself. I don't really have any further plot ideas, you see, because I thought it would be okay as a one-shot.**

**Guest- Thanks! I'm glad you liked it :)**

**39 Clues Fanfictioner- I felt really bad while writing this, since I pretty much just ruined Natalie. I was kind of divided on writing angst, since I've had people tell me I write good humor, but I guess this turned out okay. This one time, I wrote that one of the 39 Clues characters got really, really depressed (it was a kind-of songfic) and was mortified to find that a reviewer asked if the person actually died.**

**The Gone Angel- Funny, you think? Thanks, I tried.**

**Digital Insanity- Thanks for the encouragement!**


	3. Alistair

**Disclaimer: I don't own the 39 Clues, or Vespers Rising! **

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_#01: home_

Home, pondered Alistair. The four-letter word brought faint memories of a dog, ruby red slippers and a witch. Home, where Bae Oh had reminded him of his shortcomings for years.

Home was where he felt a sense of belonging, in Harvard's ancient glee club. Home was the yellow mineral called sulfate, inhaling the pungent smell. Some might say it reeked of rotten eggs, but it reminded him of home. Father had always smelled like that, a joke gift from a colleage: eau de chemist.

Home was jasmine and bamboo, which decorated the original Oh mansion, home was what Mother used to smell like, before she was driven insane. Ever since, his memories of cool hands and kind words were tainted with hospital lights and her haunted eyes.

She'd died a long time ago, not that anyone nowadays remembered. Lin Oh had died alone without a soul in the world to think of, even though her young son was kneeling by her bedside. Her last days were full of 'sentimental nonsense' as Uncle put it, first thinking she was still a girl in the rice paddies of her native home.

It burned to hear her murmur her thanks for the small naval orange he'd given her, a rare treat back in the days. On the last day, her talk changed to Father.

"Gordon," she whispered, patting Alistair's cheek with a dry hand. "Gordon."

Who was he to crush his mother's dreams of the husband she would soon see? He played along, rubbing her cold hands and rasping words of assurance, voice crackling with emotion.

At two p.m. Lin Oh died a widow, alone and unaware.

At two p.m, he lost his refuge.

The Oh mansion didn't feel the same after her passing, like her empty ghost wandered the halls in search of her dead husband. That was one home, gone.

When he dropped out of Harvard, all his old friends lost contact, except Hope Cahill and her American boyfriend, Arthur. Another home gone.

Sergei, the butler that raised him, died soon after the Korea cave-in. If only he could have lived to see Alistair's triumph over Bae, a mere two months later.

Muttering a traditional Korean prayer for lost souls, he dropped a single white rose at the single tombstone, then the Oh family plaque, bowing deeply to show his reverence.

_"Chingu." (Friend)_

_"Abeoji." (Father)_

_"Eomeoni." (Mother)_

He lay down the many paper cranes, the paper crinkling in the wind. He'd read somewhere that a thousand paper cranes would grant the wisher one wish from the gods, and immediately started folding.

The meticulous creases and folds were easy when he had an objective: happiness for his parents' souls.

"Most revered parents," he began, bowing again. "I bring you offerings of red wine and rice."

Turning it three times in the glowing incense as dictated by tradition by the oldest son, he offered the wine and moved the chopsticks to the bowl of rice, customary for the _charye, _the custom funeral customs for Koreans.

He placed the worn and chipped china spoon in the bowl as well, then turned to allow their spirits to eat in peace.

After about an hour, he bowed again before replacing the rice with water. The ceremony was done, and he turned to leave.

Looking at the black limousine at his disposal, he smiled sadly. Home was not where the heart was, as the Americans tend to say.

Home was where the dead lay.

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**A.N. I did a little background research on Korean memorial rites, so sorry if I missed something! Thanks for your nice reviews, they really make my day. **

**Tired as always, **

**Ivy**


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